Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘If he’s been “cleared”, I think that at least you should tell me what you know,’ I said. ‘I presume he was homosexual.’

‘Why else would he be in such good shape? Most hets, apart from actors, have the bodies of corpses. You object to homosexuality?’

‘Not in principle, and not yet. I haven’t had time to take it in. I’m at the beginning here. I need to know what all this might mean.’

Ralph said, ‘As far as I know, he was nutty but not druggy. A suicide, I think, by carbon monoxide poisoning. They had to fix up his lungs. I looked into it, for you. Adam — Leo, I mean. I asked them to give you the best. Some of those women were in great shape.’

‘I told you, I’m not ready to be a woman. I’m not even used to being a man.’

‘That was your choice, then. Your man had something like clinical depression. Obviously a lot of young people suffer from it. They can’t get the help they need. Even in the long run they don’t come round. Antidepressants, therapy, all that, it never works. They’re never going to be doers and getters like us, man. Better to be rid of them altogether and let the healthy ones live.’

‘Live in the bodies of the discarded, you mean? The neglected, the failures?’

‘Right.’

‘I see what you’re getting at. “Mark” might have suffered in his mind. He might not have lived a “successful” life, but his friends seemed to like him. His mother would like to see him.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘What if I —’

‘Don’t think about pulling that kind of stunt in front of his mother,’ he said. ‘She’d go mad if you walked in there with that face on. His whole family! They’d think they’d seen a fucking ghost!’

‘I’m not about to do that,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where she lives. That’s not quite what I mean.’

Ralph said, ‘My guy was struck by lightning while lying drunk under a tree. Nothing unusual about my man, thank Christ, though I keep away from AA meetings.’

There wouldn’t be much more I could get out of Ralph. I had to live with the consequences of what I’d done. Except that I had no idea what those consequences might turn out to be.

Ralph said, ‘You will come and see me as Hamlet?’

‘Only if you come and see me as Don Giovanni.’

‘Yeah? Is that what you’re going to do? I can see you as the Don. Got laid yet?’

‘No.’ He gave me my new passport and driving licence. ‘Listen, Ralph,’ I said as we parted. ‘I need you to know I’m grateful for this opportunity. Nothing quite so odd has ever happened to me before.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now go and have a walk and calm down.’

I was, I noticed, becoming used to my body; I was even relaxing in it now. My long strides, the feel of my hands and face, seemed natural. I was beginning to stop expecting a different, slower response from my limbs.

There was something else.

For the first time in years, my body felt sensual and full of intense yearning; I was inhabited by a warm, inner fire, which nonetheless reached out to others — to anyone, almost. I had forgotten how inexorable and indiscriminate desire can be. Whether it was the previous inhabitant of this flesh, or youth itself, it was a pleasure that overtook and choked me.

From the start of our marriage I had decided to be faithful to Margot, without, of course, having enough idea of the difficulty. It is probably false that knowing is counter-erotic and the mundane designed to kill desire. Desire can find the smallest gap, and it is a hell to live in close proximity to and enforced celibacy with someone you want and with whom contact, when it occurs, is of an intimacy that one has always been addicted to. I learned that sexual happiness of the sort I’d envisaged, a constant and deep satisfaction — the romantic fantasy we’re hypnotised by — was as impossible as the idea that you could secure everything you wanted from one person. But the alternative — lovers, mistresses, whores, lying — seemed too destructive, too unpredictable. The overcoming of bitterness and resentment, as well as sexual envy of the young, took as much maturity as I could muster, as did the realisation that you have to find happiness in spite of life. I became a serial substitutor: property, children, work, raking the garden leaves, kept the rage of failure at bay. Illness, too, was helpful. I became so phobic of others I couldn’t even have a stranger cut my hair. My daughter would do it. This is how I survived my life and mind without murdering anyone. Enough! It was not enough.

Now I found myself looking at young women and even young men on the street and in cafés. When, on my way down an escalator, a woman on her way up smiled and gestured at me, I pursued her into the street. I would, this time, follow my impulses. I approached her with a courage I’d never had as a young man. Then, my desire had been so forceful and strange — which I experienced as a kind of chaos — I’d found it difficult to contain or enjoy. For me to want someone had meant to get involved in maddening and intense negotiations with myself.

I asked the girl to join me for a drink. Later, we walked in the park before retiring to her room in a cheap hotel. Later still, we ate, saw a film and returned to her room. She loved my body and couldn’t get enough of it. Her pleasure increased mine. She and I looked at and admired each other’s bodies — bodies which did as much as two willing bodies could do, several times, before parting for ever, a perfect paradigm of impersonal love, both generous and selfish. We could imagine around each other, playing with our bodies, living in our minds. We became machines for making pornography of ourselves. I hoped there’d be many more occasions like it. How fidelity interferes with love, at times! What were refinement and the intellect compared to a sublime fuck?

As we lay in each other’s arms, and, when she was asleep, I kissed her and said, ‘Goodbye, whoever you are’, creeping out at dawn to walk the streets for a couple of hours, it occurred to me that this was an excellent way to live.

Next morning I was on the train to Paris, my new rucksack on the rack above me. Before we reached Dover I had helped people with their heavy luggage, eaten two breakfasts and read the newspapers in two languages. For the rest of the journey I studied guidebooks and timetables.

For a few weeks before I became a Newbody, I had been in what I called an ‘experimental’ frame of mind. After finishing Too Late , I’d been failing as a writer. I’d become more skilful, but not better. I wouldn’t have minded the work getting worse if I’d been able to find interesting ways to make it more difficult. Urgency and contemporaneity make up for any amount of clumsiness, in literature as in love. I had stopped work and had been drawing, taking photographs and talking to people I’d normally flee. I would see what occurred, rather than hide in my room. Despite these efforts, there was no doubt I was becoming isolated, as if it were the solitude of my craft I had become attached to, and it was that I couldn’t get away from.

There are few things more depressing than constant pain, and there were certain physical agonies I thought I would never be without. Flannery O’Connor wrote, ‘Illness is a place where there is no company.’ Perhaps I had been unconsciously preparing for death, as I recall preparing for my parents’ deaths. I realised what a significant part of my life my own death had become. As a badly off young man I had constantly thought: do I have the money to do this? As an older man I had constantly thought: do I have the time for this; or, is this what I really want to do with my remaining days?